The Cake in the Window

Little Tommy was a penniless and illiterate orphan whose frozen feet, wrapped in rags, stumbled through the snowfall clogging the London slums. He knew nothing of the numerous frauds and manipulations that had recently resulted in the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange, or the subsequent bank failures in Vienna; he knew only his own hunger; he would never find out how historians and economists would someday link the fraud and the hunger. He knew only there was no work to be had, no money to be had, no food to be had – and no place to go and be warm for a few precious moments. For Queen Victoria’s Britain, the decades of the “Long Depression” had only begun.

Snow had piled up against the shop windows, rendering each store indistinguishable from the next. Snow seemed to hang in the air, making the twists and turns of the narrow, ill-lit streets unrecognizable even to Tommy, who knew them well. Standing there, shivering, with no place to turn, Tommy had the vague idea that, if he could brush some of the snow from the window at which he stood, he might be able to work out where he was. God knew if the knowledge would do him any good.

His half-frozen hands clumsily removed some of the snow from the glass. He could now see that the room within was bathed in the warm light issuing from a great oven. His fingers could feel nothing, but the very sight of the enveloping light seemed to warm him and was, therefore, infinitely precious. He continued to brush the snow away, and was rewarded with a vision that made his mouth water. Right behind the glass, soaked in the unwavering light from the oven, on a large wooden table, was displayed a pile of the most delicious baked goods he had ever seen. There were columns of stacked cookies; and a huge chocolate cake from which one precise slice had been removed, the better to display the layers of delicious filling that lay within.

Everything within him yearned to be on the other side of the glass – to be in that world of warmth and luxury, where everything a human being could desire lay on the table before you. How wonderful to be the baker himself, and never have to stray far from that warming fire! The baker was apparently in the back, mixing up still more wondrous sweets.

But the word had long since spread among the few people with food in the neighborhood never to give in to the importunities of the poor. One’s duty, after all, was to encourage other people to be self-sufficient, by watching them starve. If you gave in to one of them, the rest of them would never leave you alone. Tommy knew it would avail him nothing to go in and beg, or offer to sweep up. He would do better to move on, before the sight of the ovenlight reflecting off the fresh chocolate cake drove him mad. He would do better to make his feet move, if he could, and get the blood moving down into them. He turned bravely away from the window and consciously lifted one foot after the other and he attempted to walk off into the snow.

But, as he moved away from the bakery and its sumptuous delights, the wind picked up, buffeting his face as though it were a dog shepherding a flock, pushing him firmly to reverse course until he had slid unwillingly back to the window and its delicacies. Here is the place of sustenance and delight, the window cried, separated from you by less than half an inch of fragile glass! Tommy knew now that there was no Devil; for, had there been one, Satan would have appeared to him at that moment and offered to buy Tommy’s soul for that one slice of chocolate cake -- and Tommy would have sold it to him. It would have been an easy day’s work for the Evil One.

Tommy’s desperate gaze wandered to the snow at his feet. Where was he to go? What was he to do? Suddenly, he saw it, lying on the snow not far away – a reddish-brown fragment. He wandered over to it. It was a piece of brick, eroded from some local dwelling. The force of the storm must have finally knocked it loose and flung it into the street. In his mind’s eye, he could see the bit of brick as it must have looked when it was flying through the air. Too bad its descent hadn’t taken a slightly different parabola – it might have shattered the shop window, allowing Tommy to loot the pastries within at will.

But, of course, it was not to late for the brickbat to have an encounter with the shop window. Weak as Tommy was, he could easily toss a bit of brick through a window. That done, he could grab something to eat and run, before the baker would have a chance to respond to the noise.

There could be no harm in simply picking up the chunk of masonry. Now that it was lying in the street, it belonged to Tommy as much as to anyone else. The law was on his side, he told himself, as he pushed through the drifts and seized upon the brickbat. (The wind no longer seemed to object to his movements. If anything, the wind seemed to delight in pushing him toward the piece of brick.) And then, once he had taken the fragment of brick into his right hand, he heard a different thought echo in his mind. The law is no longer on my side, he heard himself saying – the law is in my hand. The bit of brick was as hard as the law and as certain as the law – but it was now a piece of the law that belonged to him personally.

Tommy heaved the brickbat through the window. The impact of the brick made a gratifying shattering noise. The first thing he saw was the substantial and useful hole left as the brick passed through the glass. The second thing he was that there was nothing on the other side of that hole but darkness and dust. The shop was empty, bankrupt, long-deserted – just another victim of the Long Depression. The warm oven and the wooden table had just been painted on the window. The stacks of cookies had just been painted on the window. The chocolate cake and its tempting slice had been painted on the window as well, but had disappeared from this or any other world when the brick smashed them into non-existence.

There was no food inside to sustain him and no baker to give chase to him. Uttering a sob, Tommy turned away from the window and marched off into the storm, which blew without mercy into his face. It was just a block away that his last shred of strength left him and he collapsed into a doorway. It wasn’t so bad, he reflected, to let the snow cover him and build up upon his body – it formed a sort of protective blanket. He no longer felt the wind. Soon, he no longer felt the cold.

* * *